Joys career as a public artist started during a studio in the Yale School of Architecture, which gave me the opportunity to collaborate with teachers, parents, and psychologists to create learning environments for an early childhood program for children with potential learning disabilities. This taught her first hand the power for color, light, form, texture, motion, and space on how we all experience theworld around us.

Her public art works and museum installations continue that investigation into sensory realm seeking to open up new appreciation and awareness of the world around us using re-representations of the familiar into the magical. In recent worksshe includes elements that are activated by solar power and the wind.

As a trained architect and public artist Joy explores visual and verbal vocabularies with community collaborators to create public works of art that define places, represent the people of the communities and the setting inwhich the art is placed.

Joy appreciates the opportunity to include community interaction and educational outreach when creating a site-specific work. Her intention is to add value to the quality of the experience for those moving through the spaces in which the work is placed. She creates works that invite the users to become part of the environment and to enjoy the work through the experience of it. Each user has an opportunity to learn more about the environment around them. Joy strives to make works that translate the beauty of natural phenomenon, creating new ways of seeing and encouraging environmental stewardship.

Five Points Center for the Visual Arts is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.